This week we start off this Puzzle Pirates blog entry with an issue dear to all of our hearts: gender equality.

It cannot have escaped your collective notice that there exists a massive inequality between the male and female pirates of Y!PP, and the developers are not going to stand for it any more.

I speak, of course, of eyepatches.

The eyepatch has long been a sore point of contention between genders in our game. Highly sought-after, rare, and once gotten, noticeably unequal because the female eyepatches look better.

Female eyepatches are antialiased and male eyepatches are not. The reason for this is interesting: when first creating the game and putting in the injuries, male eyepatches were set as their own separate layer, but female eyepatches went under the category of facial hair. This was because hair and facial hair could be antialiased, but clothing layers had to be in 8-bit so that they could be recolored.

Some of you may remember the Santa hats of last winter holiday, when Cephalopod had to make a separate head for bearded ladies with eyepatches because you can't add a beard when somebody already has a beard (well, a beard that's an eyepatch, anyway.) Female eyepatches + beard in fact made a separate facial hair head that was called up if the female character had an eyepatch already.

Finally now, after years of anticipation, the inequality is coming to an end. Since eyepatches never need be recolorable, code will be rearranged, art tweaked, continents moved, and male eyepatches will soon be antialiased like female eyepatches and the glass ceiling of smooth eyepatch blending into the head of male pirates will be no more.